Adelaide

Our overnight bus ride from Melbourne actually wasn't too bad.  Seats were more comfortable than a plane, for sure.  We boarded about 8:30 pm and were entertained by our jocular Aussie driver. He put on the most inappropriate movie I've ever seen for a mixed age group. Rob and I glanced at each other in astonished amusement at the innuendo-laden film about a man who switches his semen for the sperm of his not quite girlfriend.  Hopefully, a lot of it went over the heads of all the kids on board.  At midnight, our driver switched off the lights ant told everyone to get off their phones and go to sleep. We arrived, bleary-eyed, into Adelaide station at about 6 am.  Although I still mourn the loss of our planned Great Ocean Road tour, I have to admit that that was the most comfortable bus I've ever ridden.

Upon our groggy exit from the bus, we catch a taxi to our Bed and Breakfast. Our kind hostess, Suzanne, is unfazed by our arrival a day early due to the auto debacle and welcomes us warmly. I get Rob ensconced into bed where he can continue to recoup, while I go into the city of Adelaide with Suzanne. She drops me off at a huge collection of shops and eateries called the Adelaide Market and promises to pick me up in a few hours.

I have a great time souvenir shopping. (Alas, I must control myself as the weight we can carry on the plane home is strictly controlled.) I come across a booth announcing "Chinese Massage."  With plenty of time to kill, I sign up for foot Reflexology, which I've always wanted to try. Although most of the massages are being given by young Chinese women, my choice of reflexology earns me the attentions of a wizened Chinese crone, with gimlet eyes and hands of steel. I tell her I have plantar fasciitis and my heels hurt.  She crushes my big toe with skeletal fingers that feel like pliers and mutters, "Bladder very bad. I fix."  She then prepares a foot bath and drops in a handful of brown powder. I put my feet in as directed and she mumbles. "You soak. Good for bladder."  As my feet soak, she begins kneading my neck and shoulders with a backhoe, at least, that's what it feels like. I roll my eyes and clamp my mouth shut as my muscles quiver in surrender for 20 painfully ecstatic minutes. She then removes my feet from the cooling bath, dries them, and begins.  My heels ache and long to be squeezed. She never touches them. Instead, she grimly attempts to dislocate each toe with her fossilized knuckles then goes on to attack my metatarsals so fiercely that I have to stuff my sweatshirt in my mouth to keep from screaming. With a last satisfied subluxation of my ankles. She leaves me to my trembling recovery. The funny thing is, my heels haven't hurt since. (Maybe they're afraid to.). And my bladder feels fine too. 

Down Under Foot Bath

Amazing Souvenir Choices

Back at the B and B, Suzanne fixes us the best, the only roast leg of lamb I have ever enjoyed. She insists that Australian lamb is different, since it's 100% grass fed, and I believe her. Americans, she proceeds to tell us sternly, do not know how to go on holiday. Only 10% of Americans, she continues, have a passport; and only 15% of those actually travel internationally. I have heard the same sorts of things from our tour bus guides, who complain that they see few Americans on their tours. She goes on to deplore the lack of paid vacation for American workers, pointing out that 4 weeks paid vacation is a minimum for an Australian worker. Can't argue with her there. 

The next day we decide to visit the German town of Hahndorf. I can't resist the kangaroo hide slippers, and they're really great for the freezing cold floors of our B and B. (Suzanne might be termed a bit of a health nut — making fabulous meals from scratch and keeping the house to a lung-bracing arctic chill. (She keeps an electric blanket and a space heater available for those of  us with weaker constitutions, however.              

The next day is our first time attempting to navigate the Australian bus system and we make it back in one- well, two- pieces. That evening, Suzanne is hosting a jewelry party and I am invited. Rob is, of course, appalled at the amount of blatant estrogen in the room and burrows under the electric blanket without delay. The saleswoman arrives and begins to peddle a variety of handbags, scarves, and jewelry while Suzanne plies us with upside down pear ginger cake. I am tutored in some of the more bewildering fashion terminology such as jumper (sweater- but not a cardigan,) wind cheater (sweatshirt) cardie (cardigan sweater,) cossie  (swimsuit) and so on. When in doubt, I decide, shorten the name and add -ie. I buy a scarf and a handbag. My suitcase is beginning to bulge. 

At the party, I find out that tomorrow is the beginning of the Royal Adelaide Show, which sounds rather like the Puyallup Fair, and that the weather is expected to be good. Our plans are thus made for our final day in Adelaide. 

When we get up, our host has left a note saying she's flown to Sydney for the day. After some consultation of the bus schedules, we figure out how to get to the city center then, with some asking around, on to the Royal Adelaide Show. It's a lot like one of our fairs, with livestock and rides and fried foods, but there's also a top notch horse show and flat racing and a benched dog show. Everything in one! Dog shows are similar to home, except that ours are almost never benched anymore. The stadium jumping is first rate. The poultry are very different from what we would see. The bantams are all really big and the silkies appear to be large fowl. They must be breeding to a completely different standard as I saw no bantams that would be show quality in the U.S. 

Benched Dog - He seems OK with it

Great Jumping!!

Our kind of show

Apple Slinky

Southern Hemispheric Polish

Returning to the B and B requires a lot more effort. I ask quite a few people for directions to this street or that stop before we get where we're going and, every time, Rob fumes a little more. What IS IT with men asking for directions? When he finally explodes it's to snarl, "I can't believe your only plan was to ASK people how to get there!! Now you've taken all my glory!" (And they say women are illogical.) Tomorrow, the train!

Stay Tuned for the Next Exciting Episode!

**Travels with Spencer**

Spencer with woven owls

Spencer loves a fair!

And, anything at a track!

Feed Spencer a Waffle!

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that cost a heck of a lot more money.

Or if you don't care for Robert Frost, there's always Robert Burns:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley.

We've been ganging agley big time in Australia this week.

We knew when we arrived in Melbourne that things would be dicey as Rob's cold blossomed into a full blown ear infection with the pressure changes on landing.  With the aid of Advil and pseudofed, we propped him up for our long awaited trip to see the Little Penguins of Phillip Island.  These 12 inch high penguins are the world's smallest, and used to be called fairy penguins or blue peguins, but are now referred to officially as "Little Penguins." Their nightly parade back to their burrows at sunset has become a major tourist attraction.  You pretty much have to be part of a tour group to see them so we once again boarded a tour bus and headed out for parts unknown.

I always wondered what a Wombat looked like...

Along the way we fed kangaroos and wallabies (I want one!), cuddled with koalas and met dingos, wombats, and other local beasties.  We also watched a champion sheep shearer ply his trade and, always a treat, watched the working sheep dogs. At last, it was dark enough and we took our seats in the sand to watch the little penguins emerge from the sea. It really is dark, which means you can't see much, and there are strict rules that there is absolutely no photography.  So, as I'm sitting in the cold sand straining my eyes to glimpse the blue and white blurs, imagine my surprise when Rob whispers, "Mom, I'm getting some great footage here."

“Ro-ob," I chide him quietly, "You know that's forbidden."

"Oh Mom," he murmurs with the supreme confidence of anyone under twenty,  "You know that's just because the idiots don't know how to stop using their flash.  I just darkened my screen and put it on manual.”

So here you have it, illicit footage of the Little Penguins of Phillip Island.  They can probably arrest you just for watching it.

Our plans the next day called for us to rent a car in Melbourne, visit the Melbourne Temple, and continue on to drive the Great Ocean Road over a period of 3 days, spending nights in Warrnambool and Mount Gambier on our way to Adelaide, where we were to spend 2 days before catching the train to Darwin.

PLEASE NOTE that this entire plan hinges on being able to drive a rental car in Australia.   In the words of a cab driver  I met once, "The left side is the right side and the right side is suicide."  I knew, of course, that I am already a menace driving on the right side of the road. However, we thought that Rob, an excellent driver with a young and flexible brain, could handle it.  We failed to count on two things: 1. Rob's flexible brain being on the brink of expiration, and 2. The Melbourne insanity they call traffic.  (Not only are the streets narrow with all kinds of busses, trams, and pedestrians to keep up with, but they have invented this insane piece of devilry called the Melbourne hook turn, wherein you turn right from the far left lane, crossing all the traffic on a yellow light. Why there aren't dismembered Aussie bodies on every street corner is a complete mystery to me.)

I have no idea why people say it's not so bad. It's awful!!! Remembering to keep left is only the beginning. You have NO IDEA where the other side of the car is, have to look over the wrong shoulder, turn signals on the other side. The works! To top it off, Rob was still half dead from his plane-acquired ear infection, gurgling incoherently and given to random attacks of piteous moaning.   I had a panic attack before we left the tight underground parking garage to drive onto the streets of one of the busiest cities in the world. We signaled by turning on  the windshield wipers, clipped a bus as we passed and crunched into a curb 3 blocks out. We parked the car and walked back to the car rental, tails between our legs.  The girl behind the Avis counter looked over her cat eye glasses at the pathetic luggage toting Yanks stumbling back through the same door they had last entered 25 minutes  prior.  Clearly, she'd seen this before.  "Where's the car? Any damage?"  We waited in silence while they grabbed their jackets and went to retrieve the object of our humiliation.  She returned at length and handed me a receipt with brisk efficiency, " You rented the car for 6 days.  You had it for less than 2 hours but I'm not authorized to give you a refund since you used a travel agent.  The left hubcap looks like you hit the curb. We'll put the repairs on your credit card. Have a nice day.”

We returned to our Melbourne hotel to take a smaller room at twice the price while we licked our wounds and decided what to do now. Rob immediately collapsed into exhausted invalid slumber, leaving me to be the adult. (If Craig had been here, I could have collapsed into a sodden puddle of hysteria but noooooo, I had to be calm and figure a way out of this mess.) Our lovely host in Warrnambool would have been delighted to chauffeur us around and was already making plans to take us sightseeing with a picnic lunch but there was a problem..  Once we were in Warrnambool, there was no way to get us on to Adelaide- neither by bus, nor train, nor plane. The only way was to return to Melbourne, a 3 hour ride and, if we did that- we would not be in time to catch a ride to Adelaide. The one train this week to Adelaide left that morning, short notice flights are ridiculously expensive and Rob shouldn't fly with his ear infection anyway, sooooo we decided to leave Melbourne the next evening by bus.

We made the best of our extra day in Melbourne, getting a late checkout so Rob could have some extra bed time, then leaving our luggage at the front desk so we could visit the Melbourne aquarium and go to the top of the Eureka Skydeck 88 (88 floors up with lovely views- reminded me of the Space Needle back home.

Atop the Skydeck

Aquarium Penguins

Aussie Jaws

Fluffy Emperor Penguin chick

Rob And The Ray

Sawfish!!

With still more time to kill before our 8:30 pm bus ride, we went to a cinema (never ask for a theatre in Australia- that only nets you a venue for stage productions; a cinema shows movies.)  We saw Mission Impossible, but only after about 40 minutes of advertising. (Very annoying, if you think movie commercials are bad back home, let me tell you, we have it easy.)  This put us behind the curve, so we had to hurry to get back to our hotel to pick up our luggage.

Proving that weathermen down under are no more proficient than their right side up cousins, it began to rain.  18 blocks later (uphill) we arrived, panting and sopping, to pick up our luggage.  Enough with the happy tourist stuff.  I hailed a cab for the 4 additional blocks to the Southern Cross station.  I switched my soaked jacket for Rob's dirty but dry sweatshirt and, smelling faintly of teenage boy, boarded the Firefly Sleeper Coach (a bus by any other name ....is still a bus), and headed for Adelaide.

 Random Ramblings:

It's not just the cars on the wrong side. It's the forks too. 

It's still like pulling teeth to get any ice around here!

This always looks to me like I should be careful, as the toilet will be easily offended. 

And anything made with kangaroo fur is just plain cool

Everything is really expensive but really fresh and good. Especially the salads- which always are served in a balsamic vinaigrette 

And have lots of interesting additions like mushrooms and quinoa and beets

**Spencer in Melbourne - He joined us for one breakfast, and had a great time on the tour and and at the coast!**

I Miss Hobbiton

I have only been gone a couple of days, but I already miss the fictional little town.  I want to share some more photos, Because I think they're pretty cool:

Quick, go back and watch the beginning and end of the Hobbit movies to match them up.

Let's Have A Birthday Party!

Is This Bilbo's Place?

And Sam's?

Or This One?

I think is the One.

OOOOOOOOO.  Smaaaauuuuuggg.

Plenty of directions

FAREWELL!